Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny Remake - Released

July 30th, 2013, 22:37

They should bother to patch it because they want to release two more games - for which they can essentially recycle the tech and most assets. And there's still a lot of money to be made. This is just a 2 person team. Let them sell 100k copies for above 10$ over all 3 games + 3 times that for 2.49$ in a Steam sale, and they should be comfortably in the black.

Originally Posted by Stingray
Why should the devs bother patching it though? They're some studio with no reputation, and nobody else is going to be buying this game after the initial reviews are out. They're better off keeping what they already got, saving their money on further development costs, changing their studio name, and going on about their business.

Well, I want to play it and I'm not going to do so now. If they fix it I'll buy it, full price or not doesn't matter if it's good. I'm sure there are others like me. And if they fix it, they get that added to their reputation.

The publisher is what decides the release date for games and so they would be at fault for most buggy releases since they gave a release date that was before the game was actually done so then it gets released without being finished. The only time this wouldn't be the publishers fault is if the developer decided to just stop developing the game and wit for the release date and then release it and in that case there would likely not be any patches released for the game.

OK, I played the german language steam version for a few minutes, and I can give a very cautiously positive report. I encountered some graphical glitches (like a woman without a face), some sluggishness in the UI response a bit of framerate stuttering (strange considering the simple graphics) and other rough edges (most glaringly, gaps in the otherwise well narrated text, where placeholder text goes (such as character names or rumors, which was jarring). But no major bugs yet. Gamesave loaded fine.
And the bit I played I actually liked. It's got the lighthearted DSA feel to the story and dialog, but also started to feel the depth, e.g. in the many survival items on sale, plenty of character stats, a big city to explore, total lack of questmarkers and handholding.
The narrated text was a nice suprise, good radio play type narration in the german version.

Overall it felt very rough, unpolished, but without the major bugs I was dreading I found it still endearing. Sure, the graphics have a very aged 3D feel, but that is what I expected based on the videos. But the scale of the city of Thorval is great, and has a kind of Daggerfall / Arena charm to it. I would say if you could live with Frayed Knights graphics, you should be perfectly happy with RoA:BoD HD
Haven't been in a fight yet.
Well way too early to give an all-clear, I am sure the many bug reports are legitimate and will bite me soon enough. But maybe there is hope if they keep patching it. There is fun to be had here, I can feel it. There is certainly elements and attention to detail that make it clear that this is not a scam - just a horribly managed and probably dangerously rushed release.

I am loading up the patch, but my half-hour experience this morning was abysmal - >50% German text in English version, loads of missing text, and on and on. Eat food and get more hungry, bug after bug after bug.

Originally Posted by HiddenX
I don't understand why they released the game so early.

It's simple - they were actually planning to release a month ago and put that on hold. They didn't want to delay it again - probably couldn't afford to. Exactly the same as Legends of Dawn, most Paradox games (at least up to CK2) and many other games and much other software. Same thing happened with Guild Wars 2, for instance. At some stage you just kick it out of the door - ready or not I'm coming!

Why does everyone imagine that software development is some perfect art conducted by God like beings? Anyone ever tried building their own house or anything like that?

Originally Posted by Stingray
Or, you know, operating like a legit business, and not selling people products that aren't even close to being ready for sale.

What planet are you living on? These guys are just a bunch of geeks who made this game on the kind of budget Blizzard have for corporate lavatory paper. Ok, so it doesn't work too well at launch, but then Diablo 3 wasn't that great either.

Originally Posted by Roq
It's simple - they were actually planning to release a month ago and put that on hold. They didn't want to delay it again - probably couldn't afford to. Exactly the same as Legends of Dawn, most Paradox games (at least up to CK2) and many other games and much other software. Same thing happened with Guild Wars 2, for instance. At some stage you just kick it out of the door - ready or not I'm coming!

Why does everyone imagine that software development is some perfect art conducted by God like beings? Anyone ever tried building their own house or anything like that?

Strange how you defend this yet bash shadowrun….seems like this one is a mess.

Originally Posted by Roq
What planet are you living on? These guys are just a bunch of geeks who made this game on the kind of budget Blizzard have for corporate lavatory paper. Ok, so it doesn't work too well at launch, but then Diablo 3 wasn't that great either.

There is simply no comparison - this is Dungeon Lords bad in terms of readiness for release. It is at least an order of magnitude worse than D3.

Only 2 developers over how many years? For a game and new 3-d engine of this scope?

This seems like a classic example of a perhaps well intentioned, but overly ambitious development. From people's dreams, and the difficulty of making a living or career in this economy, I'm afraid. I don't see this as a golden age. Lots of broken hearts… There may be some lucky gems, but at what cost?

Originally Posted by rune_74
Strange how you defend this yet bash shadowrun….seems like this one is a mess.

Huu tried both, SRR a lot (now about 40 hours) and made a good effort on ROA, about 5/6 hours. And SRR is a quite solid release, stable and very few bugs, when SOA is a total mess, even if all languages problems are fixed.

Ha well I do hope they'll fix all. But I agree there's a huge problem to release that in that state, amateurish or not. It's sort of lie and they should have release it as an alpha if really they had to release it.

And if it's amateurish and very small team, they eat less, work at night, make their wife work more, bring computer to a home or in a garage, but finish it before to release this.

I am really saddened by this news. I Really hope they can turn it around.

Originally Posted by Dajjer
But I think I only got as high as level 8 in the ROA games. I was really looking forward to a contemporary take on the games. as i said before, I hope they get it together

Are you sure you played the entire trilogy? You get to level 8 in BoD, roughly 11-12 in ST and then something like 14-16 by Riva. In fact if you play through the entire trilogy and get most of the magic items by the time you are half way through ST you are actually overpowered and Riva is a complete cakewalk, except for the final battle if you don't have any casters

Game is unplayable. I got stuck 2 minutes after getting out of the temple (the place where you can create your party). It freezed when I tried to interact with a merchant. There are too many bugs to even say this is in alpha stage. I can't even play for 5 minutes 'cause I get stuck. Well, I can play more if I'm not doing anything at all like interacting with objects or persons, just explore. I can't even comprehend how they dared launching the game knowing it cannot be played. IT'S UNPLAYABLE. Even after the first patch. I don't expect too many improvements in the future. This is just so far from even an alpha state. They should offer everyone refunds and let people who know how to develop re-create this game. Jesus, no one can force you to deliver an unfinished product unless you don't really care about your fans. I can understand developers work under pressure and they need to release a product when a publisher wants, but this is too much.
In this case it's entirely devs fault. I don't care the publisher forced the developer to deliver the game this week. Devs should refuse to deliver a game in this stage if they have some decency. In this case, they lack any respect for their fans. Buuuu you!